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This chapter moves forward to the 1370s, focusing on the massive commentaries on every book of the Bible by John Wyclif, the Oxford master and heretic. Wyclif’s interpretive theories have received substantial attention, but his commentaries (or postils) remain unedited and almost wholly undiscussed, and they are often misleadingly dismissed as early or derivative minor works. In addition to demonstrating Wyclif’s eclectic engagement with earlier exegetical traditions and his apparent interest in using the postils to explore and experiment with his own new interpretations and hermeneutic theories, careful study of the manuscripts of his postils reveals that Wyclif continued to read and revise these works until the very end of his career. Commentary was a crucial mode of writing for Wyclif, and the distinctive tensions in his approach to exegesis are revealed more clearly when his postils are read alongside another unedited and largely unstudied commentary by one of his contemporaries at Oxford, the Franciscan William Woodford. Both Woodford and Wyclif find ways to offer new interpretive material in the face of the seemingly exhaustive precedent of Nicholas of Lyre’s literal postils.
Drawing extensively on unpublished manuscript sources, this study uncovers the culture of experimentation that surrounded biblical exegesis in fourteenth-century England. In an area ripe for revision, Andrew Kraebel challenges the accepted theory (inherited from Reformation writers) that medieval English Bible translations represent a proto-Protestant rejection of scholastic modes of interpretation. Instead, he argues that early translators were themselves part of a larger scholastic interpretive tradition, and that they tried to make that tradition available to a broader audience. Translation was thus one among many ways that English exegetes experimented with the possibilities of commentary. With a wide scope, the book focuses on works by writers from the heretic John Wyclif to the hermit Richard Rolle, alongside a host of lesser-known authors, including Henry Cossey and Nicholas Trevet, and many anonymous texts. The study provides new insight into the ingenuity of medieval interpreters willing to develop new literary-critical methods and embrace intellectual risks.
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